I Am Little More Than A Jodhpur-Clad Bourgeoisie Horsefucker

North Face fleece vest and convertible pants: $175.
Salomon trail running shoes: $140.
Ex Officio vented quick-dry high-performance cargo shirt: $95.
Coming face-to-face with what a prejudiced
bourgeoisie asshole I am: Priceless.

Greg:

Quick refresher. Two things about me:

1. I am a terrible Buddhist. I totally suck at it. Therefore, I'm coming back as a flea bite.
2. I am also a charlatan, a ruse of a man, a hypocrite; and now a peasant-baiting, tea-sipping, fox-hunting, jodhpur-wearing horsefucker. To wit:

Have you ever been to Forks, Washington? In a word, depressing. Hardcore poverty in the middle of a rain forest, so not only are these poor people broke as shit, they're growing algae on their backs to boot. Forks is a logging community that may have boomed at one time or other, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any vestiges of that now. How I wound up in Forks is a tune that goes a little something like this:

So you know me and hiking. I hike, like, all to hell. One place that I've wanted to hike all summer is the Olympic National Forest beaches. Olympic National Park has like a beejillion miles of beach that stretches from Cape Cornhatch (not its real name - I've forgotten what the "real" name is) on the Northwesternmost tip of Washington State, all the way south to This-Is-Where-Kurt-Cobain-Was-Born (again, not its "real" name, and yeah, probably not that far south). There are only a couple points of ingress in that whole stretch, and those are many, many miles apart. So suffice it to say, I was all over hiking the coast. So I calls me the Triple A, I does, and has 'em set me up with the closest hotel to the beach that had any "star" rating at all, and they sent me to the Forks Motel.

After a ferry ride and a couple hours of semi-circumnavigating Olympic National Park, we pulled in to Forks just as pestilentially-dark clouds rolled in and began to threaten rain. All of this served to make the town look slightly shit-holier than it probably is on a nice sunny day...which are probably few and far between on the wet side of the peninsula. Here's a thumbnail. Every single vehicle in the town - none of which is less than ten years old or fewer holes than a Gypsy Cab - has a lift kit and knobbies. There is no form of public entertainment, not even a movie theater. The liquor store prides itself on its display of high-power rifle ammunition. I presumed from all of this that the local pastimes must be four-bying and teen pregnancy. I could be right. And then there was our hotel room, which turned out to be an exploration of new horizons in mustiness. We got a couple of scented candles which did a pretty valiant job of holding the stank at bay, but even they eventually subsumed to the dankness.

Okay, so, now I'm both needing dinner and dreading what it might be, and The In Place which is right across the street from the motel (which I've now christened The Under Arms for all its olfactory offense) has been recommended by the staff as a safe place. And they're pretty sure it's been a year or two since anyone contracted ptomaine from the navy beans. I kid, of course. But we head on over, grab a seat, and are greeted by water glasses embossed with greasy handprints. Nice.

So let me cut to the chase. The food was all "home made" (viz., not canned off-premises in some factory). The potato salad was outstanding, the pie even moreso. The waitress, indeed, all of the townsfolk that we encountered were genuinely friendly to the point that my urban paranoia was raised to methamphetaminic levels. The people of Forks - at least, all the ones that I met - were not just cheery, but genuine and unpretentious despite being poor as hell and (gathering from their appearances) subsisting on an entirely iron-free diet. It's this sort of thing that leads to the ill-conceived notion that poverty is somehow ennobling. If that were true, the year or so that I spent living in my '74 Ford Maverick should make me a Poet King. However, I am not. I am a elitist, snobberiffic horsefucker and my prejudice against the logger families of Forks is almost criminal in its magnitude. There I sat, in logo-emblazoned gear from Salamon to The North Face, the purchase price of which could feed a logger family for a fortnight at least (hell, my freakin' briefs cost $40), and having the temerity to entertain condescending thoughts about the maitre d' because he's wearing heavy duty logging braces and a torn-to-shit flannel shirt that looks like somebody planted M-80s in the elbows. And this most telling feature - his suspenders were frayed at about the height of his solar plexus. How else do you wear out suspenders in the middle other than wrestling fir logs, fer crissakes? So in short, this guy does not one but two honest day's work per day, whereas I sit in a comfy office and write junk email - a task which would never promote the growth of a single callous on anyone, no matter how earnestly they pursued it.

So all of this served as a lesson to me that no matter how much I sit on my well-cushioned ass and practice chenrezig, I still get smacked upside the head with my own prejudice. It is a humbling thing to find out that no matter how much I try to reconstruct myself, I still keep running into who I am. I guess the metric of progress is that I really am shocked by how much of what I once found repellent in others I now find quite easily in myself.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Mile One Hundred Nine

Rachel Lake is somewhere on the other side of this forbidding wall
of granite. Wiener dogs, beware!

Greg:

While you were indoors this weekend slaving over your hot brain, I was outdoors in the high pineys clocking my one hundred ninth mile this season on USFS Trail #1313 to Rachel Lake.

Yes, it's a repeat. And you can probably remember what happened the last time I went. No such deluge or aquatic cataclysm this time, just blue skies, hot sun and the fragrant north woods. And a shitload of dogs. And some rednecks. And some weed-huffing adolescents. But I digress.

So I know how I've commented in the past on how a trail can be judged by how many Fat Grammas and Wiener Dogs you meet along the way, and this one was no different. There was not wiener dog 1 anywhere on the 3 miles of trail up Box Canyon, nor were there wiener dogs on the "cruelest mile" - the mile-and-some of gullies and snags that you have to scramble to make it to the alpine basin, 1,500 or so feet straight up from the canyon. Indeed, I would expect that a wiener dog stout enough to endure the "cruelest mile" might have tree-frog digits spliced to it...or have compound eyes or the like. So I was pretty convinced that I would encounter neither Grammas comma Fat nor Dogs comma Wiener once I made it to the lake.

Imagine my surprise when I made it to the lake and encountered Wiener Dog Turbo Mark V with Fat Gramma in tow, basking on the shore. Let me tell you first that this hike was strenuous enough to make me lose 3 pounds (this is not a lie) during the trip, so seeing the two of them was both a shock and a mystery. Now I don't wonder that the dog made it because it was actually one of those Wiener/Jack Russell mixes, which means it's a wiener dog with a lift kit. It is a strange mixture, a wiener dog with monster truck ground clearance. And I don't wonder that the third member of the party, the fellah who ostensibly invented the Man-Teat, made it. But short of a drop from Sikorsky Sky Crane, I have no idea how the Fat Gramma in question hefted her bulk up the side of that canyon and on to the lake shore. Perhaps Rachel Lake is one of those mysterious bodies of water like McElligot's Pool, and she made her way there through a subterranean aqueduct. I did not check her for gills. Perhaps I should have.

On the way back I tripped on a snag, turned my ankle, went headfirstforemostassoverteakettle, skinned my knees and bruised my shirt. I'm okay, though. It just made me realize that I had gone a very long time without skinning my knees, perhaps since I was a kid. Which then made me wonder what I had been doing all this time that could be more important than placing myself square in danger of skinning my knees.

I'm looking forward to mile two hundred eighteen. Man it's great to be a kid again.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Best Damn Mac And Cheese In The Entire Freakin' Universe. Or So They Tell Me.

Not for the faint of heart.

Greg:

Teresa's birthday was yesterday, so I whipped up her favorite dish, which is of course my famous three-cheese Mac and Cheese. Since it was received with such laud and honor (the present company demanded that I crown it with a laurel wreath), I've decided to do something that I almost never do, which is publish one of my personal recipes.

I fully understand that doing so may get me in Dutch with the FDA or the AMA or one of those other agencies that try to safeguard some of our less-than-mentally-adroit citizens from expiring due to their own dietary negligence and misadventure, viz., eating D-cell batteries and the like. The fat content of this dish is alone enough to cause even the stoutest heart among us to seize up and shudder to a stop, the sodium content notwithstanding. That said, by way of illustration, a small-enough dose of strychnine will cause nothing more than ennui, so why not have just a little taste and leave the worrying to the eggheads? So here you go. Indulge. Just do so with the caveat that a serving of this dish no larger than a baby's fist is probably more than enough to kill you. Bon apetit!!

THREE-CHEESE MAC AND CHEESE

INGREDIENTS:

1 pound dry elbow macaroni

8 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons flour
4 cups whole milk

Salt to taste (more than a pinch, less than a fistful)
Black pepper to taste (more than a pinch, less than the GNP of Indonesia)
1-1/2 teaspoons dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
About yay-much paprika

8 ounces shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese
4 ounces shredded Jack cheese
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

Panko breading - enough to cover your ass with
Diced garlic - enough to please the gods
More Parmesan
More paprika

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. If you have some beer, drink one. Put on a Taj Mahal album. Start some water boiling in the biggest damn pot you have.

Now - melt the butter in a 4-quart saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in the flour to make a roux. Let the roux get brown if you're feeling that adventurous. Pour in the milk and continue whisking like an absolute madman so that it doesn't scorch or stick to the pan. Sooner or later it will thicken to a creamy consistency, or it just might not just to piss you off. If it does boil, it'll sputter like a mud-filled caldera and blister your forearms if you're not careful. If it does not boil, but thickens up nice anyway, then immediately whisk in the salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, mustard and paprika.

Take the dry macaroni and throw it in the boiling water. Now go back to the roux. Reduce the heat and stir in all the cheeses. Keep stirring until you have an ubelievably awesome cheese sauce. Turn off the burner. When the macaroni is just shy of al dente, drain it and rinse it with cold water.

Remember the cheese sauce? Okay, now meld the mamcaroni and the cheese sauce in the big damn pot, the one you used to boil the macaroni. Once melded, pour it all into a well-buttered casserole dish. Sprinkle the top with the diced garlic, panko breading, and additional parmesan cheese. I will not hold it against you if you also add more salt and/or paprika, or actually go completely nuts and saute the breading in butter with cayenne pepper and garlic before sprinkling it on top. Dowhatchalike.

Place the whole damn thing (which should weigh about as much as a Holstein calf by now) on the center rack of the oven and let it bake for 30-45 minutes, or until bubbling.

EAT!!

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Some People Will Eat Anything

...because calling it "Speckled Cock" would've been way too offensive.

Greg:

Yes, I haven't blogged in a while but I'm sure you haven't noticed other than I haven't done a lick of the work you sent my way. Here's the deal:

As you know, I "took the blue pill" and became a permanent employee of RealNetworks. After four rounds of negotiation, they gave me exactly what I asked for in the first place. In short, I'm happy. They also gave me an office that's big enough to park Shamu in. I'm sure it was available because it's out of the way, which makes it exactly perfect for me. The less I get bugged by humans, the happier I am. And the more productive I am to boot.

Speaking of productive, I've been doing another experiment on my brain, one which should interest you because it's aural. I heard tell of this Emmy-winning sound recordist named Gordon Hempton who is on a mission to preserve natural silence. Come to find out, Olympic National Park is - or at least was - one of the quietest places in the US. Hempton went and did some recording at a spot in the Hoh Rain Forest that is apparently so quiet, that you can hear a butterfly beting its wings. (Yeah. I know. Daaaaaaaaaammn.) Must be the Dr.Seussian amounts of moss in there. So anyway, what I did was put together a 20+ hour Rhapsody playlist of nothing but Gordon Hempton "jams" which are comprised from the natural sounds from various locations around the world. I let this roll in the background all damn day long, and strangely enough, I am far more productive and focused than I ever was. Now this may also be due to the fact that I have an actual office with walls and stuff, and there's not somebody babbling incoherently in work-induced psychosis mere inches from my desk, but I really do believe that I'm on to something with this "natural sound" and productivity thing. Plus, it's just fun to meet with people and have 15 minutes go by before they realize that they're hearing crickets in the hot and hissing plains of Kansas with the sound of an approaching thunderstorm in the background.

Okay, so there's that - I've been spacing off to natural sounds in my office. And then there's like other work and stuff, like finishing off things that I had promised to clients before I dutifully got the chip and became a corporate cyberzealot. So yeah, all that, and then hiking every weekend as though the warranty on my legs was about to expire any minute.

Speaking of which, last weekend I went to the Scottish Highland Games and went hiking on Mount Rainier in the same day. Am I hardcore? Mais oui! The games were incredible as always, although I believe this may have been the first time I attended them as a vegetarian. As the day wore on, the realization slowly dawned on me that Scotland is a country made entirely of meat...and stones, come to think of it...and that I would be hard pressed to find anything to eat that didn't once have a face and a beating heart. But then - aha! - I happened upon what the fry-merchants were calling "tatties", which were certainly not like the tatties and neeps that I make (to much laud and honor, I must say), but were exactly like ale-battered french fries. Before your curl your snout with disgust, let me say this: they were damn good! They were like Scottish manna. I suppose I could bring the recipe back here to Chinatown and hawk it as tattie tempura. But yes, good, and did not leave me with that "Christ, I swear the Exxon Valdez just ran ashore in my duodenum" feeling. As for the rest of the games, there were the requisite wee doggies and bonnie wee cows and yes, the 1,000 pipes and drums (no exaggeration, I actually counted) that took the field at noon, roaring like a Pratt & Whitney turbojet with a herd of cats caught in it. And then there was our dear Secretary of State of the State of Washington, Ralph Munro, who is also the Chief of the Clan Munro, delightfully shit-pied as per usual and on the mic in front of 25,000 Scots. (He may not have been actually shit-pied. He may suffer from a speech impediment brought on by too much wool.) And of course men the size of beef cattle throwing telephone poles. All of this is my idea of a very good time.


But here's the funny part: Elizabeth happened upon a can of something called "Spotted Dick" at a grocer called the British Pantry that had a booth at the Highland Games. It was obvious at first glance that it had to be purchased, if only for the comedy mileage. I mean, c'mon, it sounds like something you'd treat with amoxycillin. Even the grocer couldn't say the name of the product without sputtering with laughter. Now here's the kicker. It's really good! It's some kind of cake-in-a-can. Kinda like Boston Brown Bread. Remember that stuff? That awesome molasses and raisin bread that came in a can? And we always took it camping with us? Okay, so this is like that, only not as heavy or dark. I highly recommend it, although I wouldn't follow the preparation directions on the can. They say you should microwave it for 2 whole minutes, which in my opinion would render it radioactive. Thirty seconds to a minute should be just fine. Throw some hard sauce on there and you're pimpin', Limey style. You can purchase it here.

And then, yes, a very nice hike at Mount Rainier from the Sunrise Visitor center just down to Sunrise Lake, which is not a long ways, but at 6-thousand-some feet is still enough to get a person winded. And then I hiked the same trail this past weekend, only this time I took it 4 miles out to Upper Palisades Lake, which is gorgeous beyond belief, and actually got to speak to a Park Ranger in his natural habitat, and photographed The World's Fattest Marmot. I'll cover all of that in an upcoming edition of The Mud Shoe Diaries.

Okay, now I have to get back to all that work that I told you about, the work that has thus far prevented me from doing any of that other work that I was supposed to do for you, which I swear I will get to shortly.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Happy Birthday, Tenzin Gyatso!

Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet

Greg:

Okay, so you forgot my birthday. Blew it off. Passed it over. Shined it on. That's not important. What's important is that you remember that today, dear brother, is the 70th birthday of the fourteenth incarnation of Avelokiteshvara, The Buddha of Compassion, a man given the dharma name of Tenzin Gyatso, also known as Mister Tease Mister Please Mister Got-ta Got-ta Satisfy - ladies and gentlemen, give it up for His Holiness The Dalai Lama! And the crowd grows mild!

That's right. On this day in 1935, a grumpy little boy named Lhamo Dhondrup was born to Diki Tsering in northern Tibet. Seventy years later, yours truly got two tickets second row center (in the mosh pit, yo!) to attend His Holiness' public talk in Tucson, AZ. The talk in September will be my second dose of the Dalai Lama, the first being September 2003 when he rocked the San Francisco Symphony Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas opened. My favorite part? His opener: "If any of you came here because you thought I have magical healing powers or perhaps a third eye, you will be gravely disappointed." And his closer: "...and if that doesn't work, fuck it. Good night!" It's always a treat when a Nobel laureate and world religious leader drops the f-bomb.

Teresa and I were wondering aloud this morning about what His Holiness does on his birthday, and we pretty much came to the conclusion that he probably parties like a rock star. Not like Marilyn Manson (twenty rails of coke, pork rinds, rubber fetish rodeo) or even Trey Anastasio of Phish (bong hits, trail mix, hacky sack). Probably more like Cat Stevens (extra cup of tea, one slice of organic carrot, chant-a-thon).

So just in case you want to pick up a few extra karmic merits today, here's the official short version of the Long Life Prayer for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Go ahead and give 'er a whirl.

In the land encircled by snow mountains
You are the source of all happiness and good
Blessed Cherezig, Tenzin Gyatso
Please remain until samsara ends.

Please be advised that if you choose not to recite the LLP for HH the DL today, there is no truth whatsoever to the rumor that you will be reincarnated as a Republican.

Torch a stick of Nag Champa and give my best to Marie.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Deer Park

Olympic National Park: Man, what a shithole.

Greg:

Do not be mistaken. The picture above is not the road to the Deer Park campground in Olympic National Park. This is the Hurricane Ridge road, which is totally for pussies, Fat Grammas, weiner dogs, Christian Harley Riders and other assorted Honkies. As in it's paved. And it has two lanes. And you can drive it without making a streak in your Underoos - none of which describe the road to Deer Park.

The Deer Park road is about nine miles outside of Sequim, and is easy to spot because there's a movie megaplex and a Toyota dealership flanking it. That is the last that you will see of civilization, so take a good look. Then you wind through a rather bucolic national forest/countryside populated by poverty-level cooters and a handful of Jodphur-clad Horsefuckers who ostensibly own the aforementioned serfs. After about eight miles of this, you take a sharp right, and the fun begins.

The pavement ends, the road goes to one lane, and the trees get a lot thicker. Calling it a dirt road would be generous. It's clay hardpan with rocks the size of baby's heads which either cover the road or shower down from the hillside as you pass by. I was lucky that I rented a four-by because I would not have been able to make it up there otherwise, I imagine.

So you wind all to shit through the trees and when you finally come out of them you see that you're hanging out on a hairpin curve around a rocky overhang where even sherpas fear to tread. Do not - I repeat - do not look down. Look only at the road. You will begin to believe that this road is not the road to Deer Park at all, and is indeed the road to Castle Dracula. That's okay. Let your cold reptilian fear and the inescapable bloodlust spell of Nosferatu drive you onward.

And all of a sudden you're there. Just like that. And you're way the hell up in the sky, right at the crown base of Blue Mountain. Everything is in bloom, so the air is rich with incense of the alpine meadows. The snowshoe hare bark and play, the willow ptarmigan pads quickly through the undergrowth, the red hawk drifts silently down from the belly of a cloud, and the white-tailed deer comes up and tries to steal your fuckin' lunch. Aah, wilderness!

There's a short half-mile trail that circles the top of Blue Mountain. At about 6AM last Saturday, I walked up to the peak and took in a 360-degree view of the Olympics. The sun caught clouds as they boiled up from the canyons, trying to make their way over the peaks. I looked down through an iris of three different layers of cloud cover to see Port Angeles floating at the edge of the Puget Sound almost twenty miles away. I coulda crapped, I tell ya! It was beautiful! I didn't want to leave. Ever. Somebody at work asked me if I got any pictures, which I didn't, but the thing of it is that photographs never do justice to the mountains anyway. They can't recreate the specific luminescent blue of glaciers and they sure as shit can't frame the vastness of whole mountain ranges. And they can't recreate that exhilarating vertigo.

If it wasn't that Teresa was making something that smells really good right now, I'd go on and on about Deer Park. But hey - the stomach commands and I must obey. I'll tell more later.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Screw Bambi Already, Okay?

Just another shitty day in Olympic National Park.

Greg:

As you probably know, I went solo up to Olympic National Park on Friday to do some hiking and camping for the weekend. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's like you've gone to heaven without benefit of dying first. Yes, I really did have the time of my life. I'll get to all of that in the next blog. Let me first address this one point, the fact that the most virulent of the Seven Plagues of the Northwest Woods[1] is the deer.

Fuck Bambi. Just fuck 'im. Him and all his little fagele woodland pals. (Okay, well, not his actual pals, like the Snowshoe Hare or the Willow Ptarmigan, but you get my drift.) Here's why:

So I'm camping in the Deer Park campground on the east side of the park - what is ostensibly the "dry" side of the park, the rain shadow - and I'm cooking up my dinner in my brand new Jetboil, which is my birthday present to myself. By the way, the Jetboil is the backpacking stove extraordinaire. If you have another kind of backpacking stove, you're a fool. This thing makes water hot enough for soup in 90 seconds. Ninety. Seconds. I don't know what part of the Space Shuttle they stole to make this thing, but when I was freezing my tarts off at 3AM and I was able to make a cup of Jasmine tea faster than you can recite the Visitor's Guide pamphlet for Dayton, Ohio - let's just say I was extremely thankful for grand-scale industrial larceny.

Okay, so, Bambi. So I'm making my dinner, which consisted of instant 4-cheese mashed potatoes with some mixed vegetables thrown in. Now in the Deer Park campground, which is a primitive campground that hangs out on a ridge at 5,600 ft. elevation, there are signs all over the place telling you to secure your chow or be prepared to fight the bears for it. They even have big metal food lockers for you to store your stuff in case you didn't come with a car to lock it in. I thought I was being extremely assiduous in the way I handled my food, but the one thing that the signs don't tell you is that these fuckers will come right up and try to snatch the shit right out of your pot. The deer, I mean.

So yeah, I'm eating, and up walks Bambi, giving me the "glad eye", and licking his chops. And I mean he walked right up to me, like less than a cubit away. And I'm eating and he's huffing and so I say "shoo", and what does he do? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Just keeps staring at me and licking his chops, like he's saying "Hey man. Hey. Whattaya got going there? Aaw, look at that. Four cheese mashed potatoes - my favorite! And look, you put the little carrot cubes and peas and stuff in it, just the way I like it!" So I go, "beat it!" And he's all, "Why you gotta be so aggro, man? It's says right there on the bag that it makes four servings, so that's, like, two each if we split it." So I stand up with my pot and start stamping my feet and walking him out of my campsite with a very stern "Go - the - hell - a - WAY!" To which he grudgingly shambles off while mumbling something like, "Yeah, way to go, you bur-zhwa-zee capitalist douchebag. Your karma blows, man. I hope you come back as a deer." To which I'm all, "Fuck you, hippie! Get a job!"

So was that the end of my deer encounter? Oh mais non. There's more.

I wake up at about 10PM (I go to bed early, like 8PM and generally get up at around 4AM), my bladder distended like a wineskin. I pull on my shoes, walk out of my tent, find the closest place to pee, and do so. I go back to bed.

Along comes 3AM, and what is this? A whole lot of huffing and snorting right next to my head. So I think it's maybe a bear, and I'm thinking I should probably get ready to make a shitload of noise and scare it off - but then - WHAM! - I get a deer-beak jammed right under the edge of my tent right next to my head. So then I think goddammit! and I grab my flashlight and whip open the tent door and shine it on the deer who does what? Yeah, that's right, just stands there and stares at me. It's the "deer in the headlights" thing, I guess. So I shout and wave my arms and the little bastard goes away. For now.

Here's a fact that I was previously unaware of. Unlike every other sensible animal on God's green Earth, deer apparently love human pee. Aside from being an abominable gustatory inclination (right up there with my little dog's love of cat turds), I suppose it's the salt they're after. So as you can probably guess, the deer come back with a vengeance, this time snorting, huffing, lapping the ground, pounding it with their hooves and ripping it up with their little deer teeth to get every precious salty drop from the humus. I know that there's a lot of talk about the gentle sounds of the north woods, the trills of birds, the gurgle of mountain streams, the gentle whisper of the wind in the pines, and all that may be true. But a little-spoke-of theme and counterpoint in the symphony of the woodlands is the huffhuffhuff thumpthumpthump ripriprip huffhuffhuff of the deer feeding on pee-soaked dirt.

So the moral of this story? It is this: if you want to get a good night's sleep in the North Woods, be sure to stow all your food in a secure place, and if you must pee, please do so at least thirty six miles away from your campsite or at the nearest Safeway.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

[1] The Seven Plagues of the Northwest Woods: 1) Deer 2) SUVs 3) Gun-Toting Mulletards 4) Insolent Teens 5) Hippies (but not Oregon(tm) brand Hippies; Intolerant(tm) brand Hippies, also known as Trustafarians, Green Party Volunteers or Christ! What's That Smell!?), 6) Fat Grammas and Weiner Dogs, 7) Deer.

David Bowie Spins The World. The Rest Of Us Just Ride It.

Bowie: He's, like, way ahead of you.

Greg:

I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here, but...

One of the best things about my current gig is that I'm required to rawk almost constantly while I'm on the job. One of the best things to rawk to without ceasing is - you guessed it - David Bowie. And I'll tell ya why.

David Bowie is not actually tall and thin. It's the fact that he's moving past you at the speed of light that distorts your perspective. It's been rumored that he invented 1995 way back in 1969. He's always been something of an anachronism. In 1971, when everyone else was doing pop-and-posey rock, Bowie was doing SickSex HellRock (exhibits A and B: "She Shook Me Cold" and "Running Gun Blues"). In 1976, I walked into my junior high school in a homemade, hand-screened David Bowie t-shirt the likes of which had never been seen in that corner of Iowa. It was when my band teacher said, "David Bowie - i'n't he some kinda feggit?" that I knew I was onto something REALLY COOL.

It's a fact. David Bowie spins the world. The rest of us are just riding it.

Cheers. Now turn on some Bowie.

Bread 'N' Roses: It's Not A Band, It's A Sandwich!

The Port Townsend Waterfront - guess which century

Greg:

First things first. Take down this name and address - Bread & Roses Bakery, 230 Quincy St., Port Townsend, WA 98368. Tel.: 360-385-1044.

Now, take a plane from Reno (they do have airplanes there, do they not?) to Seattle, then get a charter flight to Port Townsend. Once you're on the ground, cab, walk or hitchhike to the above address and start eating. Why? Because it is the best damn restaurant on the planet. And I know because I've eaten at most of them. We went to PT this weekend and ate there not once, not twice, but thrice in the same day, and were overcome with profound gustative rapture each time. The abundantly joyful staff (including Java Joe - ask for him by name) serves up from-scratch soup, sandwiches, salads and baked goods that are end-of-the-trail good.[1] If you are ever convicted of a capital offense in Texas, have them fly in your last meal from this place. It's worth it.

The only downside for me is that they have no web presence, therefore I can't link to their site or steal pictures of their tooth-achingly lovely environs - a rose-enshrouded post-Victorian house in downtown Port Townsend with wraparound porch seating in the front and a puppy in the back. However, The Port Townsend Peace Movement is headquartered in the upper story of the selfsame house, and accessible only by first going through the restaurant, so link to them I must.

Do I have a recommendation from the menu? Yes. Everything. Well - in all honesty, I can't speak for any of the meat dishes, being a vegetarian and all, but I can't imagine that they're any less savory than the veggie dishes.

I was going to say something in this post about how I went "camping" at Fort Worden this weekend, and how the rainfly failed on my tent during an unusually robust overnight rainstorm (as opposed to the limp-wristed, daylong drizzle-piss rain we usually get here), but I think it's right and good to devote this entire epistle to a damn fine restaurant, don't you?

I know how you are about food, and I've heard it said that you eat almost every day, so I expect to see you in Port Townsend shortly.

Cheers, and don't forget to turn the stove off when you leave.

[1] "End-of-the-trail good" means it's as tasty as if you had just walked ten hard miles on no food at all - but you didn't. I think you know the kind of "good" I'm talking about. For more on this type of hunger, read The Mud Shoe Diaries: Rachel Lake.

Born To Be In Rehab

Jim Carroll, c. 1968

Greg:

So, to continue our conversation about the relationship betwen madness and artistic/musical ability, I submit the poet and musician Jim Carroll, who had prodigious talent in many areas, junkie-ism being only one. He was also a basketball prodigy and academic wizard. Notice the stunning resemblance to Leonardo Dicaprio who played him in "The Basketball Diaries".



Ted Kooser puts the "rock" in "Adirondack chair"

Now, for comparison's sake, I submit Ted Kooser (aka The Kooze, Terrible Ted, The Ten Fingers of Doom, Sorry I Missed My Last Poetry Seminar Professor Kooser) current US Poet Laureate, abundantly talented old coot and retired insurance company executive.

So, beyond the argument that every wildly talented person is nutso-ballo, which may or may not be true, I further submit that artistic inclination (or talent, if that's a measurable thing) has nothing to do with how screwed up or un-screwd up you may be, and is in fact only a perception/expression issue. In other words, artistic inclination is a matter of expressive or communicative style, and not a function of emotional makeup or personality. To wit - on the obverse, fantastically talented poets who were neither nutso nor ballo, and held down regular jobs (mostly) in the private sector: Wm. Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Wallace Stevens. And now the reverse, fantastically talented poets who pickled their livers, took the gas pipe, or booted themselves to Palookaville: Dylan Thomas, Wm. S. Burroughs, Sylvia Plath. And finally, the control category, fantastically talented poets who were hit by dune buggies while vacationing on Fire Island and died at age 40 without developing a really serious substance abuse problem: Frank O'Hara.

As my optometrist is so fond of saying, "Better A - or B?"

So, brother of mine, tortured live = artistic talent is a fallacy in my book. It leads to that whole "if I could just drink/shoot/snort/skrog more, I could write better" line of thinking that even I have been heir to at one time or another.

Thoughts? Comments? Or would you just like to boot some smack while listening to Stan Getz and reading Allen Ginsberg? Or eat a hash brownie the size of Linda Hunt while reading Gertrude Stein?

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Spheres Under The Influence

Hey - what the hell did I just put in my coffee?

Greg:

You know what would be really nice? If a person could actually know what their sphere of influence was.

Wait, let's try that again. You know what would be really nice? If I actually knew what my sphere of influence was. But for that, we need to start back in ancient Rome. Or was it Greece? Some place with statues and "free love". Okay, San Francisco. Good enough.

So here we are on the Embarcadero, discussing a philosopher who has long since turned to bone meal. His name is Epictetus, (I know that I mentioned him in one of my previous letters) and he came up with one of the most pithy philosophies that I've ever heard of. In a nutshell it is this:

There are certain things that you can't do anything about, so it's a waste of time to distress yourself about those things. Instead, you should just chill right the hell out and let those things go on their merry way as things are wont to do in this life. It is the nature of life for things to pass through it. Okay, so I just paraphrased the hell out of his philosophy and probably misquoted it, but you get my drift.

So where that leaves me is here: it's fine and understandable to not distress yourself over things that can't be helped, but how do you know which things can benefit from your effort, and which things are beyond your control and should be left alone? It would be nice if I could say for certain that I could do some good in this or that situation by applying skills, talent or input. But determining which things those are is the real pisser.

For instance, I figured out long ago that I can't do anything to change another person's behavior. Beyond that, I feel it would be at the least meddling and at the most disrespectful if I did, no matter how repugnant I found their actions. However, I can do something about communicating to that person what the boundaries are in how they treat me. On the other hand, the fledgling Buddhist in me feels that if I have an opportunity to do some good or at least ameliorate some harm, then I am ethically bound to do so. I know that I can prevent harm to myself and another person if I can prevent them from doing harm to me. Viz., stopping someone from hitting me stops me from being harmed and stops the other person from harming someone (and from a karmic standpoint, prevents them from harming themselves), so it's clear how defending oneself is the right thing to do in all cases. But beyond that...

I know this much for sure. The one place that I have the most influence is between my ears. That's where I apply most of my efforts. But beyond that? Still stumped.

I know that your eyes are weak , your legs are grey and wizened and your digits are knackered. But if you could summon up what little strength you possess to offer an insight here, it would be most appreciated. I'll send you a can of juice for your efforts.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Screw Insomnia Already, Okay?

Vigilance! Eternal vigilance!



Greg:

First it was the cops shouting at somebody to take their hands out of their pockets (followed by much screeching of tires and blaring of sirens), and then it was the Chinatown Street Cleaner/Demolition Derby that interrupted my sleep. And now, here it is, a buttock's arch away from the ass-crack of dawn, and I'm flogging my blog once again.

It's at times like these, when my eyelids feel like emery boards, that I envy those who can take a shot of bourbon and a Seconal or while away the early morning hours practicing the bhong, and thus render themselves unconscious. I can do neither. Gone are the days when I saw this hour of the morning through a hogshead of gin and a fistful of blow. (I mean, c'mon, did anyone do anything else in the 80s?) But considering that alternative means of reaching the state I'm in, I'll take old, cranky and woke up by the cops any day over that.

So for larfs, I was clicking on all the links in my profile, trying to see what other blogophiles there were out there who shared my affinity for - okay, pick one - William Carlos Williams [Side note: have you read Williams' "Kora In Hell"? Duct tape yourself to a chair first.], when I came smack upside the realization once again that I really don't like people. Or maybe I just don't like their blogs. And here I am being an apologist for that fact and feeling genuinely bad about it. You know what that means? Probably means somewhere deep down inside I hate myself, or feel superior, or am utterly insecure, or some other completely unflattering fact that I'd rather project onto some poor blogger like virgo_kween than ponder a means to fix. Then again, perhaps rising beyond the level of garden-variety crank to actual apologist crank is a step in the right direction.

Which brings me to the line from the "14 Things That I've Learned" that says "When I finally realized how much hatred there was in me, I no longer wondered why there was war." The problem is not sitting over there somewhere. I am the problem.

Okay, so here's the upside. (Take the gas pipe out of your mouth for a second. It's not all bad. Really!) I have a lot to work with on this issue. First of all, I know how emotions work. So that means I can get a handle on what it is that makes my eyes want to roll heavenward with flabbergastration (new word!) every time I come across, say, a Gloom-Encrusted Goth-errific Paste Merchant writing something about how certainly none can be more forlorn than they. Example: 6th June - Dark of the Moon; my heart wails to break its bony cage. I traded all my Magic the Gathering cards for a new set of fangs. Adieu.

Second, I do practice vipassana meditation, which may actually one day cure me of this affliction. And third, to date no one has kicked me in the treats for being such a judgmental douchebag.

Hey, what's that? I think it's - yes it is! Sleep! Blessed, blessed sleep!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Rachel Lake

Rachel Lake: After gazing upon such beauty, one
simply must consider gouging out their own eyes,
as much of the rest of life will be such a disappointment
thereafterward.

Greg:

I don't think I told you about my hike up to Rachel Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness a few weeks ago. It was a journey worth remembering, I tell you what. If I already told you about it, just skip this blog and go surf some porn or something.

Okay. So. I read about the trail to Rachel Lake (trail 1313, better known as the Box Canyon Trail) in some book called "Best Hikes for Children". I took a quick glance at the informative icons which showed the trail to be "moderately difficult for children". So I'm thinking, "How hard can it be?" Plus, it looked on the map like there were some interesting peaks and some river crossings and what have you, so I decided it would make a good Saturday day hike. Teresa had a drum circle to go to, so just Elizabeth and I went.

I think we all know where this story is going. Let me say just here and now that no matter how dire the description becomes, remember that I had a really good time. And remember, no matter how much I yell and scream and beg to be let out, do not open the door to my cage!

The distance to Rachel Lake is about 4.5 miles. Then it splits off and goes up to another set of alpine lakes called the Rampart Lakes which are on the other side of a 4,500 ft. elevation ridge called - you guessed it - Rampart Ridge. The first three miles of the trail are pretty flat and wind through woods and meadows and have great views of misty waterfalls cascading down the distant canyon walls. Most of the way, you're alongside the Box Canyon River, and you actually have to cross it a few times. Needless to say, the whole experience makes you consume so much beauty that your head could explode. And I'm pretty sure that mine did. I have yet to find my occipital lobe, and I know darn well that I didn't leave it on the roof of the car when we drove away.

So at about three miles in we came to the foot of an astounding cataract that was cascading down from somewhere so far up we couldn't even see it. It's an amazing thing to have an immense waterfall on one side and an awe-striking canyon view on the other. Unfortunately, I was too freaked out at the time to take any pictures. Plus I think I was out of film anyway. So we forded our way across the foot of the waterfall and headed on toward Rachel Lake.

On the other side of the waterfall, the trail got pretty difficult. It went from being a hike to being a scramble up switchbacks consisting mostly of stony gullys and toe-hold roots. Did I mention that I had a full pack? Just for practice? Well, I had a full pack. Just for practice. And it was loaded ALL WRONG. As in the load was hanging too far back, which was something that I didn't realize until I was going downhill.

So we lose the trail. But do we panic? No. Why? Because along with my awesome num-chuck (sp?) skills, bow-hunting skills and computer hacking skills , I have developed the Awesome and Terrifying Power of Map Reading. And using a compass. (The classes at REI do not blow. No, they do not.) So with a flick of the wrist, I and my trusty Indian guide (Elizabeth) triangulate our position on the map and get back on the trail.

So - and no, I'm not setting a precedent of starting every paragraph from here on out with the word "so", I'm just lazy and a piss-poor story teller - just about one living hell and thirty gallons of sweat later, we're standing at the saddle which, according to the map, is only a hundred or so yards from Rachel Lake, when it starts raining. And by raining I mean like buckets - like Malaysian amounts of rain.

So - goddammit! There I did it again! Started a paragraph with the word "so"! Anyway, quick as a cat I drop my pack and leap into my rain gear (and Elizabeth does likewise - but leaps into her rain gear, not mine). A couple seconds later, a couple of backpackers who have way more awesome gear (and ostensibly more awesome skills) than ours come down the trail. They tell us is that the weather is moving down from the ridge and the wind is kicking ass up at the lake, but it's really beautiful to look at. However, I've frozen and/or soaked pretty much all of my balls off by this point, so I opt to turn around and head back down the trail.

The crazy thing about water is that it runs downhill, and rain is pretty much all water, so that means that those stony gullys that we had scrambled up were now mini waterfalls that we had to scramble back down. And my pack was loaded all wrong, so there was much utterance of the "F" word, even though not much sense of humor was lost. Plus, the rivers that we had crossed on the way up were ten times beefier now and much less likely to be forgiving of our bullshit river-fording skills. I think Elizabeth got soakers on the way up and on the way down. She had to stop and wring out her socks a couple of times.

So my neoprene rain gear pretty much told me to fuck off after two hours of that, although it wasn't a complete failure. It leaked a little around the wrists and ankles, but other than that, it held up. But man was it cold! And painful! It wasn't until afterward that I found out that I had overloaded my pack's rating to the tune of about thirteen pounds. I'll never do that again.

So you're thinking to yourself, "Y'know Thaddeus, as I recall, you're pretty much a pussy. And I don't mean half way. I mean all the way to the bone. So what kept you going through this ordeal?" I'll tell you what kept me going. A sandwich. We bought mozzarella and pesto sandwiches and they were calling to us from the car. Once we got back to the parking lot, we took to those sammiches like hyenas to a wildebeest. They could've been made out of cat crap for all I know, but after being cold and wet for five hours and tired to the bone, they were ambrosia.

Once my hunger abated, I went back to the "Best Hikes for Children" book to see what sort of sadistic bastard would foist such a cruel hoax as to say that was a moderately difficult hike for a child. And then I actually read the description, it said, "one of the most difficult hikes in the Cascades" and "if you and your children survive the 'cruelest mile', you'll be rewarded with a view of beautiful Rachel Lake!" Christ H. Double-Dutch Jesus! If you survive - ! What kind of kids do these people have? The kind with rhino skin, ham-thick haunches and suction-cup fingertips?

Am I going back? Yer damn skippy. I plan to spend my birthday weekend (6/24-27) up there hiking the whole Rampart Lakes region. And that will certainly be fuel enough for another blog.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Screw Depression Already, Okay?

Any emotion that does this to a kid's face
oughtta be dragged into an open field and shot.



Greg:

Fuck depression, okay? Just fuck it already. It's a fuckin' waste of time. Goddamn my brain chemistry anyway. The only reason I write this stuff down is in the off chance that somebody might find it helpful some day. I was looking around the Web yesterday for resources on anxiety and depression, and that in and of itself is depressing. Why? Because there are no real humans talking about the issue. Just academics and doctors and salesmen - none of whom can adequately empathize with what I'm feeling. On top of that, every other website is trying to sell you something. Buy my tapes, eat my drugs, join my overly expensive therapy group. It's a disgusting load of crap, I tell ya! Capitalizing on a person's depression. It's unconscionable.

So I'm beginning to think that Alan Watts was right with that whole "you oughtta think less" thing. And here's why. If you entertain fewer depressed thoughts while you're depressed, then all you're left dealing with is the physical manifestations of depression. You've effectively taken the "fuel" away from the depression for maintaining itself. I'm not saying that you should stuff all your feelings. That's not healthy either. The most effective thing I've found is to simply observe your thoughts, understand them for what they are, and let them go on their merry (or not so merry) way. The problem with thoughts is that they lead you to believe that there's something to be done. The underlying truth is that there's nothing to be done about being depressed. Depression seems to be a group of particular thoughts and bodily sensations that lead a person to certain actions or inaction as the case may be. The thoughts are what keep the bodily state in place, so fuck 'em and the depression goes away.

It's at times like these that I have to remind myself that there's actually nothing going on. Like I said in one of my previous letters, actual events are over in a millisecond. Then there's a vast tract of time before any salient event takes place again. In the interim, all you're left with is thought cycles that are either grinding on what already happened, or desperately trying to anticipate what might happen next based on previous events, or trying to figure out a way to have thus-and-so happen again. It's all pretty much a monumental waste of brain power. All of those thoughts are getting in the way of the unshakeable presence of reality. It's tantamount to saying, "Get out of the way, wouldja? You're standing in the way of the view of my own ass!"

I was riding the waterfront trolley to work this morning, having all my depressed thoughts and whatnot, and trying as best as I could to just let them roll by, when right in the middle of it all the memory of the fact that riding on the trolley is fun pushed everything else aside. There's no reason why riding on the trolley is fun; it just is. There's no explaining it. And for some reason that recalled realization made me want to cry right then and there. It seems that realization would've made me react in some other way - getting happier, I suppose - but instead... Maybe it was that I wanted to weep with relief. I dunno.

But there you have it. There is still fun in the world, there is joy without reason, mirth without consequence, up without down - all of this regardless of whether I can "feel" it at the moment or not. Life itself is not an unfolding drama with me as its central character. Not even my life is that. There is much more in the world than what goes on between my ears.

Thanks for listening. Give my best to Marie.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Monte Cristo

Monte Cristo, Washington c. 1893
Fat Grammas with Weiner Dogs,
Patchouli-Stained Dirt-Worshippers, and
Itinerant Cornholers were still
112 years in the future.

Greg:

I am discovering more and more as time goes on that I am a horrible Buddhist. I'm really bad at it. It seems so simple on the surface. Mahayana has but one guiding principle: compassion with equanimity. Sounds easy, right? To fulfill the minimum requirements, all ya gotta do is sit on your can for twenty or so minutes a day and generate compassion for people you utterly despise. To that I would add that it's easier if you do it while you're eating flaming balls of iron.

The reason that this came up is because of a hike I took this weekend to a ghost town called Monte Cristo that's about two hours north of here. It's supposed to be a very popular trail, largely because it's not difficult at all - only 400 feet of elevation gain over 4.5 miles, and it's all along a US Forest Service road. We (Teresa, Elizabeth and I) went early on Sunday to beat the crowds. And here's where the "I'm an awful Buddhist" thing comes in. The reason that I get up at 4AM to drive for two hours to a trail that's over a hundred miles out of town is not because I like a little peace and quiet. That would be understandable. It's because on some very fundamental level I really don't like people. The real reason I get up early is to avoid running into Fat Grammas and Weiner Dogs on the trail. Or anyone else for that matter. Like the usual Backwoods Pretenders, Two-Wheeled Yuppies, Vegan Dirt-Worshippers, Teenage Soccer Maniacs, Soldiers of Fortune, Hair Farmers, and Itinerant Cornholers who generally plug up all the good trails every weekend. And it's for having completely incompassionate thoughts like these that I am going to be reincarnated as a canker sore.

That aside, it was a pretty darn good hike, but I will tell you this: I'm never going out for an all-day hike in a drizzle in the Cascades without every piece of gear that I own that provides either dryness or warmth. Not that I had it so bad. I didn't. I've got that crazy "wicking" gear that you can practically wear on the dark side of the moon and still be okay. But it woulda been a whole lot nicer to be able to change into a dry shirt at the halfway mark. And have some steaming hot cocoa poured out of a Jetboil.

On the upside, my Beautiful Wife Who Is Perfect In Every Way, who hails from a tropical island, and who can withstand temperatures as high as 71F and as low as 69F, didn't scowl at the cold once. As a matter of fact, she had a gay old time the whole way, humping through the mud, through the rivers, and up and down the abandoned townsite. This led me to dub the multi-hundred-dollar wetgear that I bought for her with the title Scowl Insurance. Now she can't stop going on about where we're going next. I have a hiking convert on my hands.

Ach! My starch-filled lunch has seized my aorta in its Morpheus-like tentacles! I must nap immediately whilst cleverly maintaining the appearance of being awake. I am, after all, writing this at work.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Secret To Authentic Crankiness

Old and cranky am I,
so punch you in the crotch I will!

Greg:

I suddenly realized this morning why old people are so damn cranky. Yeah, there's that thing about how everything hurts all the time, but that's not quite it. It's about reaching one's threshold for tolerance of stuff that probably should never have been tolerated in the first place. Remember how Dad, after 33 years of being an Episcopalian minister, ostensibly sat bolt upright in bed one morning, slapped himself on the forehead, and went - "Wait a minute! Jesus was never Christian!" And then of course he ran off to Israel and the rest is history.

I think there is a time in adolescence when a person develops a healthy cynicism of all the beliefs that they've been handed, and I think the same sort of thing happens in middle age. When you're eighteen or so it's like somebody says "How about mowing the lawn?" and you suddenly realize that there's nothing in mowing the lawn for you, and that there never was, and what you say next is something like "How about mowing my crotch?" That's perhaps not the best way to handle things, but with the limited experience of adolescence, it may seem like the most self-affirming and expedient.


Fig. 1: Pre-adolescent crankitude


Although the middle-age corollary of this may not have as much sauce, it is nonetheless as potent a realization. You wake up one day, take a look around, and go "HMO's? 401k's? Mortgages? All these people are fuckin' crazy! I'm going hiking!" And thus, armed with that judgment of society and the clingers thereto, you set about gathering up vast basketloads of ass to kick. The minute that someone comes by and tries to convince you that some value based in that society should be of the utmost importance to you, you reach into your basket, pick out a pre-kicked ass, and hurl it at them. That, sir, is crankiness in a nutshell. It is the unshakeable commitment to not buyin' it coupled with a healthy chorus of fuh'kawf.

And so, dear brother, I am now trying to extract myself from the embrace of that tarbaby a little more every day - the tarbaby that convinced me once upon a time that what I really needed was a nice car, a lot of income, and prodigious amounts of kowtow to the mores and wherefores of the society that supplied those two things (viz., be able to speak at length on the history and etymology of Seinfeld). Hereforward, anything that has to do with said tarbaby or its ilk and progeny gets a pre-kicked ass and a hearty fuh'koff!. And that is what I call authentic crankiness.

World without end. Amen.

Watts Pt. 2: He's Zen-tastic, Yet Alco-rrific!

Check it out! It's Tenzin Mo-Dope!

Dear Fart-Stain:

It is becoming ever-so-obvious that not only can you not reply to an actual posted letter, you can't even get your grubby dick-skinners to peck at the keyboard long enough to reply to a freakin' blog! And this whole "InterWeb" thing was supposed to make communication easy. Besides causing rampant infomania, compulsive shopping and increased access to porn, what good has it done? It can't get you to reply to a letter, so what's it worth? I swear to horse-tits, they'll be turning lead to platinum before I ever see a letter from you. Knowledge of that sad fact, however, will not stop me from ranting here and now.

So to get back to Alan Watts, Wikipedia (the open-source online encyclopedia that any autodidactic wankster like myself can edit) tells me that he was something of a sot and put away quantiferous amounts of booze that no doubt foreshortened his life. He died at age 58. You probably already knew all this, but it was a surprise to me. Oh yeah, there was that and all that acid he ate. And all that stuff he smoked. So. Yeah. Short life.

Which brings me to the point of why it should be so surprising that someone who wrote and spoke with such lucidity should also be a world-class boozehound-slash-fried-hat. Somehow I was under the delusion that someone who was so educated and practiced in Zen - viz., mental purity - would be trying to maintain physical purity as well. Maybe that's a bad assumption on my part. Perhaps the point is that one has nothing to do with the other. Or that some people are good at handling substances, and some are not (like me). Or that alcohol and narcotics are what they are, and work on the nervous system in a definable way, and all of that has nothing to do with the mythology and superstitions that have grown up around them. I've heard that certain yogis can munch down hundreds of mics of acid and remain completely lucid (Ram Dass has a story about that one), yet these same yogis do not choose chemically-augmented consciousness as their path to realization. Maybe they're hip to the fact that the consciousness does not lie within the substance.

So perhaps the point is that spiritual and mental acuity are over here and substance use is over there and although they share a sliver of a Venn diagram, neither one is utterly related to the other.

And with that in mind, I'm going to polish off my usual tankard of morning coffee. And boot some smack. And smoke the dog.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Watts: Set Your Brain On "Low"; Baste Frequently

Dig that 100-Watts smile!

Greg:

Either it's a really good idea to listen to recordings of Alan Watts while you're depressed or it's not. Here's the problem. I pointed out in another letter some time ago that one of the things that supports the refractory period of an emotion is a sort of "channel" of thought that seems to arise that will only support thoughts congruent with that emotion. Depression, f'rinstance, like the one that's been chewing at me for the past three or so days, will only entertain thoughts that support its reason for being. So I don't even have to tell you what my mental story has been the past few days. All I have to do is say that I've been depressed and you can pretty much guess the internal dialogue.

So along comes Watts, courtesy of Audible.com, and exclaims that thinking is the thing that separates us from reality. And as I said in a previous letter, thinking is almost never concerned with what's going on in the present. It's mired in the mud of some previous experience, or anxiously trying to anticipate future events. Since "present" is the only moment there really is, then maybe Watts is on to something there. I spend a lot of my time when I'm depressed not only gnawing on actual negative events in the past, but brewing up imaginary negative events to stew on even more. "Throwing rocks in my own pond", as Teresa would say. It's not bad enough that I actually had an argument with this or that person at some time in the past, but I have to go and dream up an imaginary argument to have with them in the present! Christ Jesus, do I have the fucking corner on the neuroses market or what!? What a waste of a perfectly good brain. And the real kick in the prunes is that as much as I know about emotion, it doesn't seem to stop the process from happening.

So there must be some way in which I benefit from doing this or I'd stop doing it, right? Or is that completely off the mark? Do humans continue behaviors that are of no benefit to them whatsoever? I have no idea. How is your vantage point? What can you see from over there? Tell me what this is that I have caught in my philosophical teeth.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Secret To Lifelong Happiness Revealed Once And For All! (Or Something Like That.)

This is your brain on Zen

Greg:

Here's something that I thought it might be worthwhile to pass along. I had a few realizations about happiness and quality of life, sort of like that realization that I told you about a couple months ago – the one about how most of the time, there's nothing going on. Remember that one? Okay. So. I'm going to record here, if for no other reason than my own edification (and to create a "backup" copy of my thoughts), a few observations that I've had in the last couple of weeks regarding happiness.

When I was reading about emotions and what they are and how they work and why we have them, I came across Paul Ekman's explanation of hatred. Hatred, he says, is not an emotion. Rather it is better described as an "emotional attitude". It is too long–standing and inflexible to be an emotion. It would be better described, I think, as something akin to delusion. A person who is truly delusional, in other words a person who has a definable delusional disorder, is suffering from a crystallization of logic regarding a certain subject or person. The logic is perfectly circular, seamless, and self–supporting, and furthermore does not stand up to logical scrutiny from the outside. It is a maladaption of the basic function of emotion, which is to limit for a useful time period the type of reasoning a person does. A delusional person has taken that process and frozen it in time, as it were. In that way, hatred is akin to delusion because it has a lot of the same characteristics. The emotions and actions generated become completely disproportionate to the situation, and at the same time, become the only emotional choice available to the individual.

Now if you were to take this notion and stand it on its head, you'd get happiness. Happiness has no logical connection to environmental circumstances, and doesn't have to have any apparent proximal cause. However, where happiness and hatred diverge is that the latter is an extreme narrowing of heuristics and the former is a vast broadening of heuristics (hence the description of happiness as a feeling of "expansiveness" or "elevation"). To wit, there is a greater number of heuristic choices available to a person whose prevailing emotional attitude is happiness than to a person who is not. The net effect? Happiness seems to be the wiser evolutionary choice because happy people are better equipped to adapt and respond to any situation.

I have to make clear that I am talking about the emotional attitude called happiness and not the emotion called happiness. They're two different things, just like anger and hatred are related but are not the same. The pleasant–but–transient emotion that we experience from a proximal event is what we call happiness, but the thing that Buddhists call happiness is a permanent emotional attitude which has no refractory period and no apparent connection to either distal or proximal events. One is a wave, the other is the level of the ocean. When people go about asking "how can I be happier?" what they're really saying most of the time is "how can I experience more moments of joy?" There's certainly nothing wrong with the pursuit of joyful moments, but one has to realize that the defining characteristic of a moment is that it eventually ends. If you've set yourself up so that you have to do this or that thing to experience a joyful moment, and your goal is to be more joyful, then you have a lot of work cut out for yourself. You have to keep re–obtaining the reagent that "makes" you happy. An extreme and obvious example of this is drug addiction, but people do it with all sorts of things – love, money, fame, attention, whatever.

So in a nutshell, here's what I've learned. Hatred is a type of delusion. Happiness is an unchanging emotional attitude that you either have naturally (if you're lucky) or that you can develop. Thus, there's nothing you can do to "make" yourself be a happy person. You only believe that if you have the emotion of happiness confused with the state of being called happiness.

So all of this ruminating on happiness in the past few days led to a compulsion to write down all the important lessons that I've learned thus far in my life. I set out to list 20 things and so far I have 14 written down. Hopefully I'll have 20 things some day. Here's the list so far:

20 - no, wait - 14 Things I've Learned

1. Atheism beats the hell out of a codependent relationship with and invisible friend.
2. My life has a purpose that is greater than my immediate needs. When I am aware of this purpose, it becomes the backdrop and motivation for all my actions.
3. Pain is an unavoidable fact of human existence; suffering, on the other hand, is an emotional choice that I make about my pain.
4. "Death concerns neither the living nor the dead; the former it is not, and the latter are no more." –Epicurus
5. "You can't do anything about anything that you can't do anything about, so don’t spend any time worrying about it." –Epictetus
6. The hard stuff is never as hard as you think it will be. What's hard about the hard stuff is getting around to starting it.
7. Slacking is not nearly as fulfilling as you think it will be; work is way more rewarding than it sounds.
8. Nothing that you're taught is useful until you learn and assimilate it on your own.
9. Arguing never solves anything.
10. When I finally realized how much hatred there was in me, I no longer wondered why there was war.
11. My tastes are always subject to change, therefore my definition of myself is too.
12. I have skills that I don't even know about yet.
13. Doing a little bit of something about an issue is way better than feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of it and doing nothing at all.
14. Most of the time there's nothing happening.

And now, speaking of happiness and unhappiness and the like, I have to go back to stewing about why Toolhouse hasn't responded to my counter offer yet.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie,

News Flash: Your Head Is Mostly Empty Space!

Boredom, Last Refuge of the Overstimulated 

Greg:

I had one of those great "a ha"[1] moments yesterday, one where certain ideas that you've heard over and over and over again finally make sense. When it does make sense and you say it out loud, it sounds like a tautology[2], and in fact it often is, but that neither negates nor describes the impact of the realization. To wit, coming to the realization that it's not over 'til it's over seems like a tautology, and it is. But there is a deeper realization within that statement that isn't apparent from just saying it or reading it. Even though it is an empty statement, perhaps that kind of revelatory emptiness is the kind of thing that Zen[3] is all about.

Okay – so – I was getting to that moment of revelation.. I'll tell you what I think finally galvanized it. I'm reading a book by Paul Ekman, the psychologist who's famous for discovering the universality of human expression. Ekman is the one who discovered that recognition of facial emotion is not bound by culture or race, although there are certain display rules that govern what face a person can show to whom and under what circumstances. The Japanese are famous for having strict display rules. It's also interesting to note that Ekman was trying to prove precisely the opposite of what he eventually discovered. The book I'm reading is called Emotions Revealed, and it's essentially about how to get better at reading the facial expressions of others, but the real meat and taters of it is the first few chapters where he explains what emotions are and how they're triggered. For me, that's the really interesting part. As you know, I'm fascinated by emotions, specifically the emotional phenomena of empathy.

Ekman says, as I've heard before, that emotion is "a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of physiological changes and emotional behaviors begin to deal with the situation." I would only expand on that by saying that emotion, then, is a method for managing heuristics, each distinct emotional category containing a limited number of heuristic choices. Those choices in turn are influenced and motivated by the amplitude of the emotion. He goes on to say some really interesting things about how emotions are triggered, but first, my realization. It was this: that the present moment is inconceivably vast and peaceful; and that the present is only briefly punctuated by events. These events, the ones that we respond to emotionally, are not going on all the time. As a matter of fact, they hardly ever happen. When they do happen, they're over in a split second. What makes them seem like they're effecting us continually in the present is the fact that we ruminate on events of the past or rehearse events in the future, which may also be extrapolations of events from the past. (These ruminations and rehearsals are sometimes called worry.) It's tantamount to saying that music is mostly made up of silence, or that our physical mass is made up mostly of intermolecular space. So if it's true that the events that elicit our emotional responses are only like sparks in the unquenchable blackness of space, then these events have already come and gone by the time I've seen them happen, and since I can't do anything about anything I can't do anything about, what's the point in worrying about it?

Now it seems on the surface that it might have some survival advantage to be able to prepare oneself with appropriate responses through rumination and rehearsal. I'd say that's true to some degree, but what's more important than that is possessing the ability to respond appropriately at the moment when it's needed. What's probably most effective is to keep one's emotional amplitude low and thus keep a wide palette of heuristics ready by keeping an open mind. One way to do this is through meditation. Meditation is best practiced not as an ameliorative measure for some condition that already exists, but as a prophylaxis for things that might occur. Like the Dalai Lama says, patience is something you practice when you don't need it so that it's there when you do.

So that was my moment of revelation. To say it out loud it doesn't sound like much, and it's not like I hadn't heard it before hundreds of times. Maybe it was just the addition of the realization that "much of the time, there's nothing happening" that finally turned the crank.

I have a lot of work to do today, so I'm going to have to cut off earlier than I'd like. I'm not one to leave my correspondence and keep going back to it. It's more of something that's spontaneous and created in the moment. I think that's what makes correspondence special. It's not so spontaneous that it's completely off the cuff, yet it's not so rehearsed that it becomes disingenuous.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie,

[1] No related to that hair band from the mid–80s that sang "Take On Me".
[2] Tautology: a term used in predicate logic which describes a truth which has no content.
[3] "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" always gets credited as being a Zen koan when in fact it is not. The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of someone being slapped. 'Atsa fact. Heard it from a Zen monk.